The biotech industry is experiencing a rush of AI-powered tools for many aspects of the complex drug discovery process. But one that has flown under the radar, increasingly thought to be key to certain diseases but woefully understudied, is RNA. With $35 million in new funding, Atomic AI aims to do for RNA what AlphaFold did for proteins, and find entirely new treatments in the process.
If you can still recall your high school biology, you probably remember RNA as sort of a middle man between DNA (long term information storage) and proteins (the machinery of cellular life at the molecular level). But like most things in nature, it doesn’t seem to be quite that simple, explained Atomic AI’s CEO and founder, Raphael Townshend.
“There’s this central dogma that DNA goes to RNA, which goes to proteins. But it’s emerged in recent years that it does much more than just encode information,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. “If you lo...
